With the recent victories for equal rights in courthouses and statehouses, there’s been a suggestion recently that somehow we could sidestep the whole question of gay marriage by getting the government out of the “marriage business.” After all – the argument goes – civil unions can be an arbitrary legal arrangement leaving marriage to religion where it belongs. Apparently it requires an atheist to explain that marriage is not about religion; it’s about family.
It’s easy to see why so many find this confusing. Most people cannot imagine going through a significant life event – birth, adulthood, marriage, childbearing, death – without having a priest standing nearby. But religion does not make these events happen nor does it make them more significant than they already are. Religion is like the creepy kid who wants to hang out with you but always insists that anything fun you’re doing was his idea in the first place and you need to do it his way.
Marriage is a complicated cultural phenomenon, and religion has historically gotten its parasitic claws deeper into it than other traditions, but as a happily married atheist I can assure you that religion is entirely superfluous. I cherish the bond that my marriage represents as personally and significantly as any theist. No passionless civil contract would have the same active and vital force in my life, and clearly no dreary religious ritual. So if it’s not a function of the state or the church, then what is it?
Marriage is a method to change family relationships at will, specifically to join otherwise unrelated family units into larger extended family networks. Other cultures and other times could do this in multiple ways. Powerful Roman families used adoption to create family ties between unrelated adults to the benefit of both. Many cultures used to recognize blood brothers, men not related by birth who had nonetheless chosen to codify their fraternal love and commitment to each other, and treated those oaths no less seriously than marriage vows. Obviously the people directly involved were most strongly affected by these choices, but the effects would ripple through the rest of their families and their entire community. In the case of royal families these mergers could shift the course of nations.
In the modern west marriage is the only tool we have for altering the architecture of our families, and since our business and politics are less organized around family relationships marriage mostly involves the couple and the family unit that they create by their declaration of relatedness. But seen in this light it’s clear that denying this fundamental power to a segment of the population, based on criteria that would be illegal to use to decide employment or housing, is clearly discrimination. Religion and sexual orientation have nothing to do with it.
- jack*
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